Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 20, 2012 @11:30PM
from the no-free-movies-for-you dept.

judgecorp writes "The UK's largest ISP, BT, has obeyed a court order to block The Pirate Bay, following similar moves by five other service providers, after complaints by music trade body BPI. The Pirate Bay says it can continue regardless through workarounds. From the article: 'BT has started blocking access to The Pirate Bay, becoming the sixth major ISP to prevent access to the file-sharing service. It follows blocks enforced by Orange, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk and O2, after they all obeyed a court order made in April. BT, which has been in ongoing discussions with trade body the BPI over how it would carry out a block, had not been hit with such an order until this week.'"

Can any BT subscriber comment on weather your average deck-hand will have any trouble getting around the block? I know it's quite easy for the black-beards and peg-legs, but what will it mean for the average user? Do TPB crew have enough experience bypassing blocks that most wont even know it's been blocked?

Being proud to provide that service, in direct defiance, I can say that I personally have almost 40 other domains and 18 IPs in 3 countries. And, if either happens, the one that I have provided becomes burdened or the one that I have provided is blocked, I will quickly launch another one and will see about my legal options of fighting it.
Come at me, bro.

Lets not use the term blocking. The website isn't really blocked as such. It's not possible to "Block" a website on the internet. It's only possible to disable a means of resolving and reaching a URL within a system that you can control.

The average user won't care. They'll continue getting their music from youtube, games from steam and TV from iplayer or 4od. Most pirates won't care much either. TPB became a virus fest when it became popular.

I remember when ISPs provided free unlimited newsgroup access. Then they offered free newsgroup access through a third party with a data usage cap. Then they cut off free newsgroups altogether. Now there is something completely out of their control on the general Internet that they are trying to block access to.
So much for the old wild west freedom of the Internet. Business and government interests are all so ready to curtail total freedom of information. I see a dark future full of censorship and paywalls.

It's not particularly hard to set up your own damn newsgroups. With hookers. And blackjack. They used to bitch at MCI back in the '90's that netnews was their single largest consumer of bandwidth. I don't recall the exact number quoted but it was on the order of several terabytes every few days. That was a mind-boggling number back then. Funnily enough it's all just store-and-forward messaging between parties that have agreed to store and forward messages. Anyone with the right software can set it up. If en

I think ISPs stop providing newsgroup access as people stopped caring about Usenet. Why maintain an additional server for a tiny minority of your users? The bulk of their customers want Facebook and Twitter.

I see the will to curtail, but I doubt the means. Trying to stop human beings communicating with each other, whether by statute, technology or force of arms, is pretty much guaranteed to fail. You are probably right that some politicians will support draconian measures, and some businesses will profit from paywalls, but I think history teaches us that this will just be a little noise in the grand scheme of things, and people will carry on doing what people always do.

Blocking -- or atleast trying to block -- Pirate Bay and similar websites is just a temporary measure, there's bound to be worse stuff coming. As I already mentioned on my Google+ - page about the recent confirmation of the Flame-malware being written by the U.S. government and the U.S. government basically saying they have the right to target, track, spy and eliminate anyone they want, anywhere in the world, at any time, and even using illegal means to do so is all right, and that no other country in the world has any say in that, it doesn't seem to me all too far-fetched that with enough lobbying from RIAA/MPAA the U.S. government will write similar malware that targets pirates -- both the ones posting copyright-infringing material and the ones downloading such.

Your anti-US screed is totally pointless and tiresome and comes apropos of nothing.

Yet you do not provide any actual counter-arguments. It *is* a known fact that both Stuxnet and Flame were written by the U.S., and it *is* a known fact that they recorded huge amounts of personal data and resorted to illegal means for doing that and they targeted entities that were not located on U.S. soil. So pray tell, what in my post is inaccurate?

And I don't feel like I need a counter argument, because what you said wasn't an argument in the first place and how would I possibly argue against it? It was just a random anti-US statement that came out of nowhere, because this is Slashdot I suppose.

I have a friend who has just moved to Sweden
I am trying to convince him to let me route all my traffic through his home broadband connection via VPN
Would be interesting if this idea became widespread
In return he can route all his traffic through my home broadband connection

Am I the only one who gets confused when this company comes up in a storry related to Bit Torrent? It's gotten me a few times before, but this one really got me good. "BT starts blocking Pirate Bay"... Da' fuck did I just read?

The mirror they maintain at [pirateparty.org.uk] is yet another reason to get involved with your local pirate party. There website indicates that they can use assistance from UK residents who want to help with:

So, they do advocate censorship then. But only for "bad things" and presumably they think that copying movies isn't bad enough. But something else might be. Censorship is binary: you are in favour of it or you are not. You can't have "partial censorship".

And we can have either totalitarianism or anarchy, there's no partial system of government right? I know what you're saying, either the government has to stop flows of 0s and 1s or they don't. But it's a bit like saying either we give the police guns and the right to shoot people or we don't. And we do, just not any random people whenever a police officer likes it - it's a partial "license to kill". At least here in Norway there's an Internet filter and it's for one thing only - kiddie porn. Going out with

In neither of your examples is the actual speech made illegal. Only the consequences of it.

All speech has some degree of consequences. Using this logic, even China has absolute freedom of speech. After all, they only punish people for the consequences of their speech (whatever those consequences may be).

Of course, none of this matters because it's pretty clear that people are being punished for their speech. The actions of others are separate from their speech, and their speech is what they're being punished for (if they never said it, they wouldn't have been punished).

I happen to be working from home today, so I'll spend a few minutes checking how they block TPB on the ISP O2, just out of curiosity.

WWW: I get a page telling me that the page has been blocked by court order

DNS: They return the correct IP address: 194.71.107.50

Traceroute: I get to thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se (194.14.56.2), but not all the way to the web server, on both a censored and a non-censored connection. This is probably because TBP filters out some ICMP packets, nothing to do with O2.

Ping: I can't ping the TPB server from any connection. (same reason as above)

So TPB have locked down their web servers pretty well. Makes things more difficult for me. I couldn't find any open ports apart from 80. So I'll do some more checking with the webserver:

I get this page even when using the IP-address in the URL, so there is no Host: www.thepiratebay.org header.

Now let's do a traceroute on TCP port 80. First, I tried BBC, and I got some hosts outside of the O2 network, specifically:bbc-linx.pr01.thdow.bbc.co.uk . Now for TPB: The same as for an ICMP traceroute!! This is weird. It's clear that O2 are not proxying HTTP connections, at least not at the SYN packet, because the HTTP SYN packets get all the way to thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se (194.14.56.2).

OK so let's try to get the web server to leak some more information: I tried some different URLs and with "Host: 127.0.0.1", and just get the same "blocked" page. If you're on IPv6 you can have a look at the page at my local web server: http://blackhole.lan.fa2k.net/f/tpb-blocked.txt [fa2k.net] . Let's try a bogus request with telnet:[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ telnet 194.71.107.50 80Trying 194.71.107.50...Connected to 194.71.107.50.Escape character is '^]'.GET/HTTP/1.0 400 Bad RequestConnection: closeDate: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:57:00 GMTServer: lighttpdFrom the non-censored connection I get the same thing. Now I mistyped some HTML request into telnet, so I'm probably on some kind of list. Who cares, it's not illegal to be curious. Now let's try a valid HTTP 1.0 request with netcat:[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ printf "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n" > the-request.txt[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ cat the-request.txt | nc 194.71.107.50 80HTTP/1.0 301 Moved PermanentlyX-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.4Location: http://thepiratebay.se/ [thepiratebay.se] Content-type: text/htmlContent-Length: 0Connection: closeDate: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:08:22 GMTServer: lighttpd

Neat! This seems to come right from thepiratebay itself. Maybe the blocking software doesn't understand HTTP 1.0. And no, "http://thepiratebay.se" doesn't work in a browser. It's a different server than.org, but acts in a similar way.

A HTTP 1.1 request without a Host: part is invalid, let's see what comes up when changing "1.0" to "1.1": a 400 invalid request, it seems to still come from TPB, as it has the lighttpd header. Supplying "a" as the host, I get the 302 again.

Transparent proxy most likely. I had loads of problems with their firewall/censoring software when trying to connect from my O2-based mobile network (giffgaff) to my O2-based broadband (Be). While trying to debug the situation I found out about their transparent proxy system as well. It acts like a MITM attack, sitting in between you and the real server, intercepts everything and rewrites it if needed/told to.

I never solved my issues, and the mobile guys were utterly unhelpful, so just switched away, but

Correction; The difference was not in the Host: header vs. the server IP address. It was that I was using "\n" for line breaks, while the HTTP standard requires "\r\n". Thepiratebay's server understands "\n", but the O2 blocking system doesn't. So it even works with thepiratebay.se as Host: header.

Pretty sure they've done it via the BT DNS, the IP leads straight there with no problem. This looks like BT are doing the bare minimum to comply with the courts. Completely blocking the site in the UK is pretty impractical anyway, in this case the laws "reasonable steps" equates to the techie's "virtually ineffective". The lack of basic computer knowledge amongst UK law lords and politicians is depressing and a tad scary.

I'm all in favour of copyright, the artists/funders have to see some sort of profit

And that is... what? A sanity check? Oh the COURTS ordered it? So it must be fine and dandy?

Of course not. Welcome to the Moron Club. The courts (which do appear also to be a members of the Moron Club) do their work based on the laws passed and other previous judgments, making the lawgivers obvious members of the Moron Club too.

The fact is that:

1) The Pirate Bay does nothing criminal. They host no illegal material nor do they link to it. They host a list of hashes not derived in any way from illegal materials. They are just data that are useless on their own.

2) Blocking access to information is censorship in it's pure form. No democracy should allow any form of censorship.

3) Any block can be easily circumvented. It's nothing but symbolic and does more harm than good on every level.

It is true that in our brilliant minds TBP isn't doing anything illegal.
However they still got deemed as doing illegal shit according to the Swedish Court system (not saying it's right).
These are facts, and due to one country saying it's illegal it's going to pop up in more countries... Once the snowball starts rolling you know

Under British law it is entirely possible that they have committed an offence of Assisting or Encouraging a crime [cps.gov.uk]. Everybody knows it is a site designed to help people get free access to material that they would otherwise have to pay for. It's even called The Pirate Bay.

Blocking access to information is censorship in it's pure form. No democracy should allow any form of censorship.

This is bullshit on so many levels. Firstly, if The Pirate Bay is only hosting "a list of hashes.... that are useless on their own" how can it be considered censorship to block access to The Pirate Bay?

how can it be considered censorship to block access to The Pirate Bay?

What!? Are you saying it's not censorship to censor an entire website?

Secondly, there is no censorship if an information provider refuses to publish all of their information.

It is if they're actively blocking the material. Under your definition, censorship doesn't even exist in any form. A religious website was blocked because someone found it objectionable? Not censorship. Completely okay.

I think your definition of censorship is pure nonsense.

Is it censorship for me to refuse to put my credit card number on my web site?

That information was never public in the first place.

If it were censorship then admission fees to cinemas would be censorship and they are not.

It's clear that you have no idea what censorship is. Blocking the content itself would be censorship.

Welcome to the enraged dickhead club. My point was that it is not the fault of the ISP for following what they were instructed to do by the courts. Why should they deliberately fly in the face of a court order just to satisfy your particular world view? My post had nothing to do with the legitimacy of TPB, nor was it a broad social comment on censorship in general. I simply took an issue with the fact that the OP had blamed the ISP for the decision.

they have the best prices around for the FTTC (and I _love_ my infinity).. and they were the only major ISP in the UK that balked at this court order. There is plenty wrong w/ them but at least they made a (half) stand.

Overpriced - yep. Censored - yep, like every other ISP. Incompetent - not as an ISP. Great uptime, decent enough speed, plus you get to use their wifi hotspots which are located in pretty much every street. If you don't mind paying they are one of the best ISPs around.

These stupid fucks, will never learn.Torrents are just the new way of doing P2P. You can not block P2P. It's impossible.

Yes, blocking at the backbone level can be defeated. With freedom.

Face it, Bittorrent is P2P but TPB is not. It's fundamentally a single domain name bound to an IP addy, it's a brand; TPB only works because people know they can reliably type "thepiratebay.se" or some similar easy-to-remember name and it'll get referred. TPB can start playing games with different names and proxies and referrers etc., but this'll knock out 90% of the casual users.

Or use Google to search for "stuffiwant.torrent" and the results will popup from Extratorrent, Isohunt, Kat, and such. There's even a.torrent search extension for Firefox. If people want to download it, THEY WILL...

I am aware that Google occasionally partakes in collecting AdWords revenue off of someone else's movie.

Just remember, you're paying $50 month for the Internet, you paid $1000 for the computer, people are constantly collecting money from advertisers based on what you see, all of this money is going to billion-dollar mega-corporations, and not a dime of it is going to the people who made the thing you're looking for.

Amazing, professional musicians average about $34k a year; I assure you Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber aren't hurting, it's the session musicians and engineers and the 99% that get cut out. Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.

If you're trying to be anti-establishment, you're doing it wrong. If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while

I would like to see a reference that backs that number... or the median salary. Then again you seem to consider the session musicians not be professionals, even though they get paid for the sessions, which probably skews your statistics.

By the way, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are statistically insignificant.

I'm a sound designer and I make my living working on movies. When movie revenues go down, they don't fire the actors and the directors, they sit pretty, they aren't dispensable.

Become an actor or director then. But remember, once again, that there are actually very few actors or directors that make it big (once again, statistically insignificant when considering the whole acto

I don't see any violence in my comment, sorry. And I am still interested in knowing the source of that $34k average salary statement.

Besides, his point is somewhat ambiguous:

If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while feeding more cash to the people that are hostile to you, and withholding all the money from the people the make the content.

What does boycotting BT have to do with information wanting to be free? AFAIK the "information-wants-to-be-free-whiners" argument is comonly used to criticize P2P advocates and the like, not people using one ISP or other.

Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.

Well that's three mistakes in one sentence. Well done! BT was privatized in 1984, over 20 years ago! They ran a lot of adverts trying to get small investors, i.e. individuals, to buy the shares. Although a lot are owned by pension funds etc now, there's still a significant percentage of stock in individual hands. So not government owned. Nor is it a monopoly; BT is actually separate companies under one umbrella. BT Openreach owns the poles, cables and exchanges, and provides access to all other ISPs and phone service providers at the same rates - including BT openworld, the ISP arm. They're heavily regulated to ensure access, and also have price caps set by the regulator. ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.

Openreach for example, haven't got round to upgrading my exchange to ADSL2 yet, but talktalk and sky have both put their own in the exchange, so do offer ADSL2, and only pay BT openreach for rent of the copper line to my house - I don't pay BT directly at all, and the service is cheaper to boot. There's also virgin internet, our sole cable provider having bought up the others, who have an entirely separate infrastructure over about 60% of the country.

BT openworld is the largest single UK ISP because of its brand, but if you tot up the subscriber numbers of the top 6 (via ispreview.co.uk) they've got about 33% of that number; and there are many, many smaller ISPs that all have the same access to the same openreach phone lines and exchanges that the big 6 do. Note virgin, the cable provider, is the 2nd largest.

Finally, 19 billion? revenue is about £4 billion a quarter, but falling. Profit is more like £500 million a quarter, which includes all their sub-company profits.

If you were principled you'd boycott BT.

Why? BT are a private company providing wire and ISP services, same as the others. They have to follow court orders, just like everybody else. They were actually one of the people that fought the order hardest in court; but the judge has decided that he has the right to censor websites not in the UK, convicted of nothing in the UK, and that he can order private companies to spend their profits purely on the say so and to the supposed benefit of other private companies on the basis of zero reliable evidence, to whit Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI.

If we should be boycotting anyone, if should be Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI for their abuse of the legal system to require ISP censorship.

Or did you actually mean you just want us to boycott the internet because we must all be dirty pirates if we think blocking thepiratebay is wrong, and shouldn't pay for an internet connection but just send the money direct to artists for music we can't listen to because we have no method of downloading it any more?

Personally, I think you should use the pirate party's own proxy [pirateparty.org.uk]. I'd like to see the brouhaha when a political party that promotes civil liberties and digital rights has its website censored by court order.

ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.

Of course, the newest feature on the block is fibre-to-the-curb, which requires the use of BT Openreach-owned hardware for the ISPs entire network, including the links from the exchange IIRC. Plus, no matter who you're getting ADSL from you're reliant on BT Openreach for physical cabling to the exchange and their repair department is awful thanks to their monopoly - if it's an intermittent fault and it's not happening when they visit, they assume it's your equipment at fault and charge you for the visit.

f it's an intermittent fault and it's not happening when they visit, they assume it's your equipment at fault and charge you for the visit.

Worse than that they charge your service provider for the visit who then charges you. So AIUI it's your service provider who has to fight to try and get you to pay a fee that should never have been charged (and who ultimately may end up having to decide between eating the cost and losing a customer) not openreach.

The proxy is a good way to use TPB (and I agree about the fallout). However, so is using Plusnet or a raft of other ISPs that haven't had court orders slapped on them yet. Make sure to tell BT why you're leaving too (of course, if you're at the start of your contract, you may have to wait a while, so the proxy is your friend).

BT aren't helpless in all this - they could run full page ads in the national papers about this, they could write to all their subscribers, they could lobby the government. They have,

Clearly there is small (but according to the RIAA; significant) part of our society that clearly feels that those "people who made the thing" make enough off of it.

FALSE. We believe the "people who made the thing" are not making enough off it, while the middle men that sit between the artist and consumer use their power and influence to extract money from the process, are. If you support the artists, pirate every fucking thing you can, and spend that money on live shows instead. The music distribution business as, it exists, is no longer needed. What artists need are PR firms and managers. People who work for THEM.

Representations about the sort of split artists have with "middle men" are casually fraudulent [wordpress.com] and slanted pro-Free Content propaganda. "Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs, it doesn't help the artist in any material way -- Comcast, Google and AT&T thank you for your "Piracy (for Civil Disobedience)", they profit smartly off it! A hell of a lot more than the musician does.

What the fuck does an "Android, C#, Ron Paul" fanboy know about music industry contracts?

BTW, I'm a semi-pro musician myself and I also hope the labels and distributors go belly-up. So do the signed artists I work & perform with regularly. The only signed artists that care about people sharing music are the very few at the top that are being marketed hard by the labels and have sold out (Metallica, I'm looking at YOU), or are in a weak position with their label and cave to pressure to join the anti-sharing propaganda machine.

Even if you didn't download everything, chances are you'd still need an internet connection (or, at the very least, have one). So downloading everything probably won't put any more money in the pockets of ISPs than usual.

"Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs, it doesn't help the artist in any material way -- Comcast, Google and AT&T thank you for your "Piracy (for Civil Disobedience)", they profit smartly off it! A hell of a lot more than the musician does.

The problem is that these "middle men" are highly exploitative of artists and the consumers. These profits are then used to solidify their monopoly position even further, and on an international scale. They are able to do this because they own all of the distribution channels. This is why the Justin Bieber's make millions, and actual _artists_ can hardly make a living wage. If these companies did not exist (in their current form), art would be sold on its merits, and more artists would be able to earn a liv

"FALSE. We believe the "people who made the thing" are not making enough off it, while the middle men that sit between the artist and consumer use their power and influence to extract money from the process, are."

So the answer is to make sure the "people who made the thing" make NOTHING off it instead of too little. All I know about the people at TPB is they deserve my money even less than the middlemen.

"if you support the artists, pirate every fucking thing you can, and spend that money on live shows

In order to make this argument, you have to concede that the creators are entitled to be paid for their work, and that your problem is only over the mechanics of delivery and price discovery. Is that right?

Although, I want to expand upon the idea of entitlement. I believe that it is in the best interests of society to temporarily entitle creators to be paid for their contributions in that it helps create new content for the Public Domain. I don't care about the creators nearly as much as I care about the concept of the Public Domain. It represents the sum of knowledge, all of our art, all of the hard work and expressions of our ancestors that allow us the luxury of near instantaneous communicat

In order to make this argument, you have to concede that the creators are entitled to be paid for their work

Wait... why? What if you're not saying that creators are entitled to be paid, but that they should at least have set up a way for someone to pay them if they choose to do so? It's possible for someone to argue in that way.

Or use Google to search for "stuffiwant.torrent" and the results will popup from Extratorrent, Isohunt, Kat, and such. There's even a.torrent search extension for Firefox. If people want to download it, THEY WILL...

Even then, all that would be needed to stop piracy is to make illegal distributing.torrent files containing copyrighted material. And while the sites themselves don't host the files behind a torrent, it's obvious that they are the vehicle which makes it possible to copy the warez. Then they just snipe down Extratorrent, Isohunt, Kat, etc. and ultimately there's not much to be found in Google results either.

Well, I have to take back some of my bullshit by adding that while killing the public torrent scene might be possible, pirated files would probably still have a bright future in some other forms in Internet...

There are already distributed search engines for.torrent files and technically there are still a lot more possibilities.Google, TPB and all the other torrent sites are just more convenient; they are by no means an essential part of the infrastructure.In fact,.torrent files itself are just a specific implementation of a concept, and could (and will eventually) be replaced by something more advanced.

Even then, all that would be needed to stop piracy is to make illegal distributing.torrent files containing copyrighted material.

You cannot stop copyright infringement with laws alone. In any case, this approach would probably involve the US proclaiming, once again, that it is the king of the world, as it seizes websites in completely different countries... Or the RIAA/MPAA could go the usual route and bribe every politician. Either way, corruption will be rampant.

I just wrote some days ago a script that collects the magnet links to torrents from the piratebay. All of them. People should have the latest one before it gets completely shut down. This will help not to loose any previous torrent at all. And instead of using torrent browser websites, we make a p2p network for torrent search. There are already systems for that. So with, or without piratebay, we gonna be ok.
The bigger problem could be the deep packet inspection, but that's gonna be a cryptographic war, whe

Also to be in cahoots with the Anti-virus industry such that the RIAA/MPAA viruses aren't detected by AV scanners. Actually, have them detected but be 'impossible' to remove without taking it in to someone....and that someone is obligated to report the attempted copyright infringement instances.

In order to dramatically cut down on piracy and actually see an increase in legitimate sales. The hardcore downloader is not going to buy the stuff in any event; the casual ones may actually do so if you make it too hard to download.

All while the more technical ones give the "casual ones" easy workarounds. But really, these people are at least proficient enough to use bittorrent, so I don't really see any such blocks preventing them from using a workaround.